Friday's Fast Five | Target’s Big Circle Perk, Wendy’s Surge Pricing Backlash & Whole Foods Gets Smaller

Hello Omni Talk Fans! Anne and I are headed to Vegas twice in the next two weeks!

The first time for our maiden National Grocer Association voyage, and the second time will be for, you guessed it, Shoptalk 2024.

We are frantically working to lock down our livestream interview lineups as well as prepping our onstage interviews, so stay tuned as we promise to bring you up-to-the-minute coverage from both shows over the next two weeks.

Now, turning your attention to the reason you open up this email every Friday -- our weekly Fast Five Podcast.

This week was pound-for-pound our strongest collection of five headlines, possibly, ever. Every single one of them had "meat on the bone," as Anne and I like to say.?

In This Week's Fast Five Podcast, Anne and I discussed:

• Wendy’s about face on surge pricing
• Target’s new paid membership program, Circle 360
• The RealReal’s store expansion plans
• Sam’s Club’s new design thinking studio
• And closed with an examination of whether Whole Foods’ plan to open smaller stores is, first, a good idea, and, second, if it is an idea that will actually work

There’s all that, plus cereal for breakfast, our newest OmniStar, and a tip of our cap to all our loyal fans for helping to make this our 1,000 podcast episode!

Listen to This Week’s Fast Five Podcast

Be careful out there,

-- Chris, Anne, and the entire Omni Talk team

P.S. Anne and I are always attempting to break the retail content sound barrier by trying new things. That was certainly the case this week as we invited two lawyers from Microsoft onto our live webinar series to give their opinions on how to use AI responsibly.

The discussion is some of our best content of late, as evidenced by the fact that our live audience kept growing all the way up until the end of the broadcast.

Who knew two lawyers having nothing to do with the O.J. trial could be that engaging?

You can listen to the full recording of the webinar by clicking here or on the big image right below this sentence.